Food Poisoning.

I contracted food poisoning and was hospitalized for three agonizing and biologically repulsive days. What an event that was. Lying prone in a Mexican Hospital, doctors came and went, not knowing exactly my problem. "Well, Mr. *****, my guess is..." "Guess?! You're a high paid doctor and all you can do is guess?!" I'd moan. To make matters worse, someone died in the room across from me. I could hear them chanting something and women crying. It was the old geezer who was annoying me with his pathetic moans on the first day I arrived...well, get the stiff outta here! This isn't a morgue. It's a bring down for the other patients. I remember going to the toilet to puke and I passed the old mans room. Sheet pulled over his face, two women sniffling. I saw him before, as a matter of fact in the morning an hour before he died. An ugly little man with a pot belly and a scraggly, dirty beard, always groaning. How bleak and sordid and meaningless his death! God grant I never die in a fucking hospital! Let me die in some louche bistro, a knife in my liver, my skull split with a beer bottle, a pistol bullet through the spine, my head in spit and blood and beer, or half in the urinal so the last thing I know is the sharp ammonia odor of piss--I recall in a Tijuana bar a drunk passed out in the urinal. He lay there on the floor, his hair soaked with piss. The urinal leaked, like all Mexican toilets, and there was half an inch of piss on the floor--or let me die in an Indian shack on a sandbank, in jail, or alone in a furnished room, on the ground, sodomized by a group of homophobic Marines, on a street or subway platform, in a wrecked car or plane, my steaming guts splattered all over torn pieces of metal... Anyplace, but not in a hospital, not in bed. Actually, I think I have foreseen my death. It will be in Mexico. I will be crossing the street and some naco ranchero doesn't see the red light because he's too preoccupied whistling at some pregnant Indian walking with her five kids. He's flying headlong, Mexican music blasting and runs my ass over. Anyway, finally I was released from the Hospital and I stumbled home and rested the rest of the day.